Renovacíon

A monthly review of education,
literature and social science

To reform is to live. - Jose E. Rodo

Organ of the National League of Teachers

Again in the trench

We bring two ideals to the arena: to raise the integrity of academia and to reform the actual system of education.

Both ideals triumph today in the most cultured spirits of the teaching profession and in the most significant accomplishments of the modern of society.

In our progressive ideals, we are joined by the most distinguished professionals and even some directors of education, as can be observed at the latest pedagogical meetings. Until our governing system establishes the right of assembly and the right to protest the acts of those who govern tyrannically, we are given to the reasoning of the same conservative members that we repudiated yesterday. These are the first fruits of our sowing. We claim the honor of having contributed to this with the goodness of our testimony and the perseverance of our action to morally change the atmospheric conditions in the tiers of academia. We breathe new ideas oxygenated with youth and liberty. There is a ferment of idealistic passions in the environment and in the souls of selfless rebels.

It is the National League of Teachers that triumphs in moving actual public opinion. There is an unusual movement of propaganda between educators of all ranks and in the educational works of the nation, one can now glimpse an awakening full of hope, laden with regenerative dreams. This is what the Argentine school needs, indispensably, to be reformed in its foundations and its aims, for this is precisely what will seize the status quo and boldly inspire the future.

In our printed propaganda we aspire to this purpose, to interest men of talent and the people in general in the problems of education. We want to create in public schools a new moral climate of great intellectual ideals and deep popular sympathy. For us, the educational problem is not exclusively pedagogical: it is the foremost social issue. The pedagogy is not but a branch of sociology. And the greatness the century consists in that it does not allow us to cowardly avoid the solution of the great questions that are now raised in all the land, the global phenomenona of contemporary social life.

The problem of education is deeply tied to the problems of the Ethical, the Aesthetic and the Sociological. Because of this, no modern teacher can be indifferent to philosophical discussions or scientific questions and ideas that impregnate the social atmosphere of our time.

We believe that the educational revolution will succeed because the intellectualization of academia will result in the cultural elevation of the people. To give the people the capacity to be educated according to their own will is above all to give them the capacity to govern themselves.

We dream of great reforms and believe that these times are of action.

The great passion of the ideal is now free of the insignificant individual passions that threatened our support. Convinced workers of the faith, we do not dishonor the importance of this work with vulgar skirmishes with colorless spirits and the anxious that do nothing and let nothing happen because they are afraid and will distort and disfigure all. Nor do we wish to dally in childish contemplations against the prejudices that can free us or the qualifications that may deserve our praise, of